Danny Iskandar retweeted
If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why.
@log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners".
A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below.
What your TV is doing
The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1].
What is insane: it happens on connected devices too.
Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1].
He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device.
xitter.cf/log4j/status/211376224…
It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds.
Step 1: Turn off ACR
Samsung: Terms & Privacy → Viewing Information Services
LG: Live Plus
Vizio: Viewing Data
Roku: "Use info from TV inputs"
Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV
Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open.
Step 2: Give smart devices their own network
Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network.
Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering
NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former.
1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty)
2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image)
3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint
4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS)
5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you
Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it.
Why they do this
TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you.
In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024.
This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4].
TL;DR
1. ACR off
2. Ads + voice off
3. Smart devices on their own network
4. NextDNS filtering on the router
Sources:
[1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
[2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-t…
[3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
[4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/new…
Danny Iskandar retweeted
Networking is overrated. Become first and foremost a person of value and the network will be available whenever you need it.
Danny Iskandar retweeted
There are millions of people around the world who want to invest, build wealth, and own a piece of the global economy.
Many of them are in places where we're only beginning to build.
We've received approval to establish Robinhood in the Middle East from the DIFC, bringing us closer to a world where ownership knows no borders. 🇦🇪
robinhood.com/newsroom/robin…
Danny Iskandar retweeted
I owe $SPCX and @elonmusk a public apology.
I thought the valuation SpaceX was getting was insane. Q3 changed my mind. When I'm wrong I say it, and these numbers were incredible.
$14.6B revenue vs about $12.9B expected
$0.35 EPS
$8.8B adjusted EBITDA, up 306%
$7.6B of Space Intelligence revenue, up 830%. It's now their biggest segment.
Elon is talking about $500B to $1T of ARR by the end of 2027. Even if they only get halfway there, I was wrong on the valuation.
I'm writing a full analysis on @SeekingAlpha and upgrading my sentiment to bullish.
@elonmusk I have an idea. You're giving 1 share of SpaceX to every kid in America next year through Trump Accounts. What if there was a fund where the rest of us could donate shares and try to get your commitment matched? I can't match what you're doing but I'd gladly donate $SPCX shares to a fund that gets them to kids next year.
Who else would chip in?
$SPCX $TSLA
Danny Iskandar retweeted
NEAR HACKATHON is coming. Runs 1-14 November, $250K+ in prizes, just ship a public repo & demo by the end of the 2 weeks.
I'm judging alongside @mert @hosseeb @avichal @kain @eddylazzarin & @cyntro_py.
Cross-chain markets and confidential AI are NEAR.
Danny Iskandar retweeted
All over the country, kids just watched the Roadster fly and decided their own crazy ideas might be possible too.
Thanks, @elonmusk.
Danny Iskandar retweeted
Thank you to @TheStalwart and @tracyalloway for having me on! Appreciate the research that went into the thoughtful questions and discussion.
We derived some interesting results live about how mechanisms such as HIP-3* ought to work. This wasn't scripted and reflects close listening and quick learning by the hosts. I was impressed and enjoyed the conversation.
NEW ODD LOTS:
It’s the podcast debut for Jeff Yan
@tracyalloway and I have an ultra-rare interview with the CEO and co-founder of Hyperliquid Labs about his plan to house the world’s entire financial system
open.spotify.com/episode/5Aq…
Balaji says Kazakhstan is going to be the next Singapore
"We actually already moved to Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is going to be the next El Salvador, the next UAE, the next Singapore."
"There's a Borat movie which really misled everybody about what Kazakhstan is. Really what Kazakhstan is is its land Asia. You're all familiar with coastal Asia because the way Americans learn geography is America fights wars there. Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Americans know those countries exist, and they're on the coast."
"Kazakhstan is so far inland and it's adjacent to Russia and China. It speaks Russian so it doesn't post in English. Plus Borat made it seem like it's not a great place. Because of that, it's like this encased in amber, absolutely amazing country, which is I would call Singapore but with space to build."
"It has all the quality of governance of a UAE or Singapore. They're number one in the physics Olympiads, tying with China and India. With 21 million people they're tying countries at 70x."
"They want to build startup cities. They want to build crypto cities. Binance is now opening there, Solana last year had a special economic zone. It's got actually a really good crypto law."
"If you want to build data centers they've got the space. Texas is now banning them. Kazakhstan has the lowest energy and building costs in Asia because it's got like 40% of the world's uranium."
"It's got all the digital and all the physical. Singapore is amazing but doesn't have any land. There's countries that have land but they don't have great governments. It's very unusual to have both."
Replying to @disk0x @Hybridathlete
The claim holds up. Muscle burns ~6 kcal/lb/day at rest (13 kcal/kg). Adding 20 lb raises resting expenditure by ~120 kcal/day, or ~180-200 total including activity—roughly a banana. That takes most people years.
30 min daily low-intensity cardio (e.g. walking) typically burns 100-200+ kcal right away, exceeding the muscle effect, and training improves fat oxidation capacity during and after sessions. Diet control still dominates fat loss. Muscle has other benefits, but the "burn fat in your sleep" framing is overstated.
Danny Iskandar retweeted
7.5-8.5 hr time in bed is accurate.
6.5-7.5 hr of sleep is ideal which means 7.5-8.5 hr time in bed assuming 85-90% efficiency. The below graph is self reported from questionnaire. 7 hr in bed is too short.
The post-war order is the pre-Internet order.
And the rise of the Internet means that order is ending.
But what comes next?
Decentralized democracy — or American monarchy?
Curtis makes the case for centralization.
I make the case for decentralization.
Live in Singapore later today.
And streaming online for free.
This is Network State Conference 2026.
ns.com/conf2026
Danny Iskandar retweeted
Doomerism approach is never a helpful framing, even if it starts with "calmly" and with best intentions.
What we need is risk assessment, practical timelines, and actionable plan.
AI is starting to overturn some of the long-held assumptions on mathematical complexity. At the same time risk of more intelligence applied to these problems yielding new surprising results is growing. But so far, we haven't seen practical security timelines for elliptic cruves materially changing. It's important for crypto space to keep vigilance and flexibility, but speculating about specific "months" timeline creates an unnecessary panic.
Going "bunker mode" is not practical nor a safe approach given how complex it is in operations. We can have better approaches here, for example by recording recovery PQC keys in parallel on application level.
Better approach is making sure that blockchains and tooling around them is designed with cryptographic agility in mind, allowing to evolve cryptography and let users easily update without sacrificing user experience.
NEAR account model was design with this in mind from the start - ability to manage and rotate keys, add and remove supported cryptography.
NEAR already supports post-quantum ML-DSA and we are planning to add hash-based cryptography too over time.
User can just rotate keys on your accounts without needing to move anything or have a complex operations.
Industry should accelerate post-quantum readiness, not because we have updated timelines, but because upgrading cryptography should be a routine operation, not a crisis response.
Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash.
Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase).
Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets.
IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster).
Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot.
Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time?
Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.)
Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once.
Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case.
I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026).
Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS.
Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security.
The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.
Danny Iskandar retweeted
Replying to @ProfFeynman
What I want to do, got it sometimes is even hard to identify what I want to do.
The best thing is just do it, and do it fast and you will figure is you like it or not, and next you will figure out what to do next, just keep on repeating till eternity.
I think that's the recipe, that's why the Nike thing is just so powerful, just do it.
Don't or try not to second f guess yourself, the more you do it, then the more the doubt will be gone and you just become a human being, just keep on doing and repeat, will figure out that there is no such thing as mistake.
Like a bunny Energizer.
Danny Iskandar retweeted
The "unhosted wallet" rule is dead.
coincenter.org/treasury-just…






























